Related papers: Agencies and Science-Experiment Risk
The question of whether collider produced of subnuclear black holes might constitute a catastrophic risk is explored in a model of Casadio & Harms (2002) that treats them as quantum-mechanical objects. A plausible scenario in which these…
The deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has accelerated rapidly. AI enabled technologies are facing the public in many ways including infrastructure, consumer products and home applications. Because many of these…
We discuss speculative disaster scenarios inspired by hypothetical new fundamental processes that might occur in high energy relativistic heavy ion collisions. We estimate the parameters relevant to black hole production; we find that they…
We uncover a phenomenon largely overlooked by the scientific community utilizing AI: neural networks exhibit high susceptibility to minute perturbations, resulting in significant deviations in their outputs. Through an analysis of five…
Conventionally, experiments probing the quantum nature of gravity were thought to be prohibitive due to the extremely high energy scales involved. However, recent and rapid advances at the intersection of quantum information and gravity,…
We recommend that the planetary science and space exploration community engage in a robust reevaluation concerning the ethics of how future crewed and uncrewed missions to the Moon and Mars will interact with those planetary environments.…
Simulations - utilizing computers to solve complicated science and engineering problems - are a key ingredient of modern science. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is a world leader in the development of high-performance computing (HPC),…
It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural, artificial and their evolutionary systems. We put this hypothesis to test in a system of evolving foraging agents controlled by neural…
In general, professionals still ignore scientific evidence in place of expert opinions in most of their decision-making. For this reason, it is still common to see the adoption of new software technologies in the field without any…
Government investigatory and surveillance powers are important tools for examining crime and protecting public safety. However, since these tools must be employed in secret, it can be challenging to identify abuses or changes in use that…
Scientific research requires taking risks, as the most cautious approaches are unlikely to lead to the most rapid progress. Yet much funded scientific research plays it safe and funding agencies bemoan the difficulty of attracting…
Privacy risk assessments have been touted as an objective, principled way to encourage organizations to implement privacy-by-design. They are central to a new regulatory model of collaborative governance, as embodied by the GDPR. However,…
Self-testing--the attractive possibility to infer the underlying physics of a quantum device in a black-box scenario--has gained increased traction in recent years, with applications to device-independent quantum information processing.…
Nuclear energy technologies have the potential to help mitigate climate change. However, these technologies face many challenges, including high costs, societal concern and opposition, and health, safety, environmental and proliferation…
This article provides a necessary corrective to the belief that current legal and political concepts and institutions are capable of holding to account the power of new AI technologies. Drawing on jurisprudential analysis, it argues that…
No one doubts the utility of insurance for its ability to spread risk or streamline claims management; much debated is when and how insurance uptake can improve welfare by reducing harm, despite moral hazard. Proponents and dissenters of…
If checks and balances are aimed at protecting citizens from the government's abuse of power, why do they sometimes weaken them? We address this question in a laboratory experiment in which subjects choose between two decision rules: with…
Observers and practitioners of artificial intelligence (AI) have proposed an FDA-style licensing regime for the most advanced AI models, or 'frontier' models. In this paper, we explore the applicability of approval regulation -- that is,…
Existing space-based cold atom experiments have demonstrated the utility of microgravity for improvements in observation times and for minimizing the expansion energy and rate of a freely evolving coherent matter wave. In this paper we…
The occurrence of workplace accidents is described within the context of self-organized criticality, a theory from statistical physics that governs a wide range of phenomena across physics, biology, geosciences, economics, and the social…